Stealing History

by Gerald Stern

Overview

In what could be boldly called a new genre, Gerald Stern reflects with wit, pathos, rage, and tenderness, on 85 years of life. In 70 short, intermingling pieces that constitute a kind of diary of a mind, Stern moves nimbly between the past and the present, the personal and the philosophical. Creating the immediacy of dailiness, he writes with entertaining engagement about what he’s reading, be it Spinoza, Maimonides, John Cage, Etheridge Knight, James Schuyler, or Lucille Clifton, and then he seamlessly turns to memories of his student years in Europe on the GI Bill, or his political and social action. Unexpected anecdotes abound. He hilariously recounts the evening Bill Murray bit his arm and tells about singing together with Paul McCartney. Interwoven with his formidable recollections are passionate discussions of lifelong obsessions: his conflicted identity as a secular Jew opposed to Israel’s Palestinian policy; the idea of neighbors in various forms — from the women of Gee’s Bend who together made beautiful quilts to the inhabitants of Jedwabne, who on a single day in 1941 slaughtered 300 Jews; and issues of justice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595341167
Publisher:	Trinity University Press
Publication date:	01/16/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Gerald Stern's recent books of poetry are Divine Nothingness, In Beauty Bright, Early Collected Poems: 1965–1992, Save the Last Dance, This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award, Odd Mercy, and Bread without Sugar. His honors include the Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Award, the Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Prize, four National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from the American Poetry Review, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2005 Stern received the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry. For many years a teacher at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Stern lives in Lambertville, NJ.

Table of Contents

1 Park Bench 1

2 Dragonfly, Famous Deaths 7

3 Chance Writing, Saints 16

4 The Lamb 19

5 Christ 27

6 Diary of the Mind 34

7 Dogs 35

8 Tyler School of Art 40

9 Rome and the Jews 44

10 The Living Presence 47

11 "Christians" in Haiti 49

12 Education of the Poet 51

13 Straddling 53

14 My Mother and Father 55

15 The Train Station 57

16 Athletes 59

17 Jack Gilbert 64

18 Haiti, the Long History 64

19 Exploitation 66

20 The Comic 70

21 Sports and Business 85

22 Deicide 87

23 War Work 90

24 Learning Poetry, Living Cheap 94

25 Dragonflies and Being 99

26 Uncle Harry and the Robin 100

27 Lucille's Death 103

28 Four Crises 106

29 Fifty More Pages 112

30 Alana Rose 118

31 26 Vandam 119

32 Signs over Gates 127

33 Dragonflies 128

34 My Big Mouth 130

35 Trip to New York with Poet-Potter 133

36 James Schuyler 136

37 Dog Eat Dog 138

38 Academy of Arts Medal 141

39 Meister Eckhart 144

40 Larry Levis, Caravaggio 147

41 Angela Hazley's Death 155

42 Playing Jacks 160

43 New Zealand Broadsides 166

44 Demystification 167

45 Remorse, Gilgamesh 173

46 Etheridge Knight 178

47 Pruning Hooks 187

48 Charlie I 196

49 Israel 197

50 Nut Death 199

51 Anti-Semitic Cartoons 205

52 Marie Ponsot 206

53 Again Haiti 207

54 Charlie and Elvira 207

55 McChrystal 208

56 Bob Bernat 210

57 Montpellier 213

58 The Steel Pier 219

59 Charlie III 219

60 Libby 221

61 Bialystock, 1906 225

62 Poland I 227

63 Poland II 229

64 Neighbors I 232

65 Lev Going 238

66 Lev Not There 239

67 Neighbors II 243

68 Neighbors III 246

69 Neighbors IV 253

70 Saltwater Pools 259

71 Childhood in New York 262

72 Henry James in New York 264

73 Air-Conditioned Nightmare 267

74 Henry Miller's New York 270

75 Simone de Beauvoir's New York 273

76 Atlantic City 278

77 Turkish Restaurant in Paris 279

78 Paul McCartney 280

79 Yom Kippur Pear 282

80 The Engineers Club 285

81 Betty Kray 288

82 Hole in Forehead 289

83 The Stages of Life 298

84 Port Authority 300

Permissions 305

Editorial Reviews

Gerald Stern is one of those writers whose style insinuates itself into your consciousness like a catchy tune, so that you find your thoughts echoing its rhythms, bopping from one to another, back and forth, like thought and language doing a jitterbug.” — Philadelphia Inquirer

“There is no warning as to where Jerry, as his many friends call him, will strike next as he roams about his long and productive life.” — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“It is patient and wise, but also frenzied, angry—kind of wild. It’s loose and free, but also elegantly written. The work is a trip, full of humor, wit and wisdom. The kind of thing you read in slow, measured sips. It's your grandfather on Sunday afternoons, after his scotch, plunked down on the beat-up old armchair that became his honorary pedestal.” — San Antonio Express-News

“By turns Talmudic and profane, unsentimental and heartbreaking: the poet transforms himself in these essays into a Tristram Shandy for our times, a Montaigne who finds in the intricate unspooling of experiences, outrages, and joys a perspective that is generous, wise, and cut through with wit.”— Walter Mosley

From the Publisher